Singing Call Evenings Version 2008-01-05 Martin Ingenhütt can lend it to you. Then again it is astonishing how Index the simple addition of one single song to the list can 2004: Songs of Trains and Engineers 2 change the musical or contextual balance of the 2004: Ballads of Outlaws and Sinners 5 evening, or at least of the tip where you plan to put 2005: Time for Gemutlichkeit 8 it. Sometimes one songs makes two other ones im- 2006: Love and Disaster 12 2007/08: Come Along and Ride This Train 15 possible, and if you do not find another good place List of Recordings 17 for them, this might mean that they are lost for the Colophon 18 evening – at least when you try to group your tips in a way that is homogenous in content. English Abstract For example, in the program about outlaws I initially was very much against aspects such as the devil or This article provides some background information about a couple of singing call evenings the author the transcendental – but the song Thunder Road turned out to be stronger than my concerns, and in performed in the last years. The document might the end it was even strong enough to find two ac- help other callers who perhaps also plan to do such complices that made the tip – and eventually even an evening – you might not intend to make an exact title of the evening had to change... copy of something we already did, but my thoughts and remarks might trigger your ideas. Or perhaps Arranging matching songs to a tip by criteria of their you just find it amusing to read. The document lyrics is an element that we will most probably also gathers everything that came to my mind when I keep in the future – just like the structure of seven thought back to what we had done. tips, possibly one single patter in the evening and some other details. It also amuses us a lot to take one song or the other from one singing call evening Deutsche Zusammenfassung to the next so that the evenings get a secret relation- Dieses Dokument bietet eine Beschreibung von fünf ship to each other. Singingcall-Abenden, die der Autor Martin Ingenhütt zusammen mit Nicola Pronobis in den letzten Jah- One thing did really bother me for some time. ren durchgeführt hat. Ein Caller, der selber einen Sometimes you need a long time searching for the Singingcallabend veranstalten möchte – sei es mit original lyrics and trying hard to distribute this stuff einem ähnlichen oder einen anderen Thema – wird so that a maximum of the original story is kept in the möglicherweise mit Interesse manche unserer Erfah- beginning, opening and closer of a song. But when rungen lesen. you perform it, you find that the dancers use every Grand Square to just ride over it with loud noises. I Basis dieses Dokuments war je ein deutscher Bericht only came to terms with this when I remembered der ersten drei Abende. Diese Originaltexte werden that we are not really here to transport text messages nicht weiter gepflegt, ich stelle sie aber gerne Lesern – after all, isn't it already half of a wonder when we zur Verfügung, die mit dem folgenden englischen succeed in singing a song, keeping the dancers in Text Schwierigkeiten haben. Email genügt, Adresse movement, having them in the correct moment siehe ganz unten. close to their corners and bring them home? And anyway, every art is subtle: Of course most of the details you care for are never realized, but in the to- Introduction tal they make a climate of care, accurateness and A tip of three singing calls is shorter than a usual tip diligence, which will be recognitioned very well. of a patter and a singing call: So when we started planning we found we had to schedule one extra In the following, I will go through the program of tip. Seven tips times three singing calls makes up to each of our evenings and simply comment every 21 songs – which can be a real lot, depending on song we used. No – these were not necessarily our the theme. announcements (although obviously at a few places they were) – and yes, we are actually able to sing a When actually arranging such a program, often ran- song without first giving a lesson. dom plays an important role. There are songs that you do not want to miss but you can not get hold on – the record is out of print, and none of your friends 1 2004: Songs of Trains and Engineers repeats. It was a successful and beautiful evening, perhaps only affected by the summer heat without an air condition or the possibility to get fresh air. In order not to exhaust our dancers too much, we spontane- ously decided to shorten our program by two songs. Nevertheless, the following describes our original plans, as they were anyway the basis for a repeat three and a half years later (see in the very end). Tip 1: Good Evening! Engine, Engine Number 9 This song was a random finding in the Internet – very charming! The train is just coming around the corner and will hopefully bring the girl – if she did not deboard before… We sang everything in closed harmonies. Rockin' in the Rhythm of the Rain This song has a completely different topic – sitting comfortably together in the rain on a big two-person swing. But the lyrics of the middle break suddenly compare the rocking rhythm with that of a slow freight train – a really strange, almost erotic ap- Flyer Songs of Trains and Engineers proach to our theme, which we felt we simply could not keep back from our audience. Mostly sung This was our first singing call evening; it took place alone by Martin. on August 11 in 2004. The idea came when our usual venue was occupied so that the club evening Steel Rails had to be moved to another place – as the venue was unusual we got the idea to also offer an unusual This song has been made known by John Denver. It program. In addition, a member of our club had had describes riding a train from the viewpoint of a hobo the final test for becoming a locomotive driver just – a vagabond as they traveled through America in in the weekend before. the time of depression. At that time, I had a repertoire of not even a hun- This song actually only consists of two lines; this dred singing calls, and it was apparently not exactly pair is then repeated three times to form a figure or a easy to find the twenty-one songs that we needed break part. In other words, it consists of no less than for such a narrow topic. This lead us to widen the 28 identical two-liners, which sooner or later will theme sometimes a bit, which in my eyes does not even become aware to a dancer. It is therefore not at all easy to sing: You will have to find variants cause a problem. We found some of the 'lacking' songs by searching the Internet and by asking callers again and again and – if you sing in harmonies – colleagues. have to decide them in advance and perform them exactly. This was not easy and took quite some After the first rehearsals, the list started to become preparation. clearer, and we started to group the songs by criteria regarding both content and music; eventually every tip had its own theme which showed to be very Tip 2: Very Old Songs helpful for the moderation. The beginning of Country Music is marked by the Carter Family, and two of their best-known train Basically, we sang most of the songs in two-part songs have been sung by almost every country harmonies with Martin as the leading voice – even singer. I definitely cannot imagine a singing call the figures were sung in harmonies in more than evening about trains without Orange Blossom Spe- half of the cases. We usually do two different figures cial and Wabash Cannonball. per song, sometimes with slight variations in their 2 Orange Blossom Special (Break) Unfortunately it was only possible to find this song Ten minutes interval! – I like to structure such an as a patter recording, and its structure did not allow evening in a way making only short interruptions converting it into a singing call at the computer. As between the tips plus one or two long ones instead we did not want to do without it, we did a patter of many breaks of equal lengths. Apparently, you (Martin), the only one of the evening; it could re- should announce how long you plan the next inter- place two singing calls and allowed discretely prac- val. ticing some of the figures we planned to use in other singing calls later in the evening. Tip 4: Train Accidents Perhaps my biggest problem was to not start imme- diately but to remember writing down the dancers… This is the dark side of the train romantic! Collision, derailing, and even train robbery. Of course, these are all older songs; we sang all of them in parallel Wabash Cannonball harmonies. We used a recording that had apparently been made with a Yamaha DX 7 synthesizer or its successor. I Casey Jones like best the opening false locomotive sounds. Closed harmony singing throughout. The song about the probably best-known engineer in the entire history – in the USA, almost everybody knows him.